I said yesterday, that I was going to make an announcement today, and there it is: I have released a new website: motnear.me. It shows all the MOT centres near the visitor’s location.

MOT stands for Ministry of Transport test, and checks that the vehicle meets road and environment standards. It is done for all sorts of vehicles in the UK. My aim with the website is to create a unique place, where the vehicle owners can find all the information needed about MOT.

The website allows users to search by postcode (or any other piece of address), and all the MOT centres within 20 miles radius will show up on a map. The data is freely available on the data.gov.uk and I have used some nice open source software to put it all together. We’ll go in more detail about this and other aspects of a living website in other posts.

The first version of the site went live a week ago and only had a list of centres, with details about each centre. I have already submitted the site to Google via the Webmaster tools and there are almost 10 thousand centre pages indexed so far. Unfortunately I missed some important information from the centre page, that relates to the type of vehicles the centre services, but I have rectified that now.

I have planned a few more features to add to the site in the next few days, including Help, About, and information about MOT. The website is already mobile friendly, which is surely helpful.